Police Pledge a Crackdown in Clinton Hill As Quality-of-Life Crimes Spike

Responding to mounting community pressure in Clinton Hill, the 88th precinct is today launching an initiative to clean up quality-of-life crimes on the Grand Avenue corridor, sources said yesterday.

One of the hot spots police will target is the corner of Putnam and Grand avenues - a dusty triangle between the neighborhood's streets of ancient mansions and brownstones, where neighbors said drug dealers openly make hand-to-hand trades and gamblers play illegal dice games. At the beginning of June the spot had its first slaying in three years, which has served as a rallying call for the neighborhood in recent weeks.

Though crime in the area is down significantly in all the major crime categories during the last decade, the Brooklyn neighborhood has already seen four slayings this year, according to Compstat reports. There were no murders last year. Reports of rape, burglary, felony assault, and grand larceny are also up slightly from the same period last year. Shooting incidents have risen to 12 this year from six last year, the reports show.

"It's a complete open-air drug market that everyone is aware of," a Clinton Hill resident and local business owner who would be identified only as Karl said. "There are drug dropoffs every morning. There are bicycle delivery people that you continually see riding about. You just avoid that corner."

The neighborhood complaints culminated last week with a meeting hosted by Concerned Residents of Grand Avenue, where the 88th precinct's commanding officer, Captain John Cosgrove, and the Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles Hynes, appeared.

Captain Cosgrove told the audience that several dozen of the precinct's officers had been moved to other more problematic precincts in the borough, making it harder to fight the quality-of-life crimes on street corners, according to a report of the meeting at Brownstoner.com. Mr. Hynes said he would pay special attention to the block.

The precinct's new initiative will likely involve flooding the Grand Avenue corridor with police officers, sources said. Community organizers are pushing for surveillance cameras to be installed in crime hot spots.

"There is high unemployment at that corner, so unfortunately individuals believe the best recourse is for them to engage in the drug trade," the neighborhood's City Council member, Letitia James, said. "It's also the fastest and quickest way for them to get incarcerated."

Using the nuisance abatement law, the city is also trying to close down the Lefferts Hotel, a source of community complaints about illegal activity, Ms. James said. A manager of the hotel declined to comment.

A former president of the Grand Avenue block association was allegedly threatened by drug dealers to stop his campaign to clean up the neighborhood several years ago, leading him to quit his post and the association to fold, an organizer and local resident, Stephanie Gillette, said. With renewed interest in the problem, Ms. Gillette said she hoped the authorities would make a long-term commitment to the problem.

"There has been a lot of lip service in the past," she said.